Upwell Station Scam
A courier contract with a delivery destination that the delivering pilot does not have access to.
The contract owner will be part of a corporation or alliance that owns at least one structure, and that structure’s access will generally be restricted to only members of that group. Because there is not currently a convenient method of verifying whether your pilot has access to the destination structure, the player who accepts this contract will be unable to complete the delivery, and the scammer will make a profit on the cost of the cargo due to the large collateral.
An example of how such contract could look like:
Let’s have a look:
- High collateral.
- Relatively high reward compared to what you usually see.
- Take especially notice of the warning: “Station may be inaccessible!” (indicated by the yellow arrows), what this means is that the destination station is an Upwell Structure and that you may not have docking permission.
- Route takes you through Lowsec but that’s not really that important, all it does is adding another point of possible failure.
- Cargo to be delivered is small enough for just about any Industrial Ship to be able to haul it. Could almost fit inside of a Cruiser.
These courier scams can be difficult to spot due to the flexibility of structure placement. While more technologically-inclined players can use ESI to check if his or her pilot has access privileges, most players should assume that any unknown player-owned structure is inaccessible to them.
This sort of scam has been completely nullified by CCP’s Upwell Cargo Deposit release (September 11th, 2018) making it possible to transfer items from outside of “station” even if you do not have access to it.